"President Manuel Quezon today signed a proclamation transferring the Constabulary
to the army and increasing the force from 5,500 to 9,000 men ..."
--Newspaper clipping

THE last decade.

In 1926, the Constabulary was conducting the usual field operations in Mindanao and Sulu. The force consisted of 132 companies, with an artillery platoon, and they were in garrison in 162 stations in the archipelago. 6,053 men, they had; and only twenty-five of the officers were Americans.

A reorganization had come into the geographical districts. There were but four divisions now: the Department of the Visayas; the Department of Northern Luzon, and Department of Southern Luzon, and the Department of Mindanao and Sulu.

Lieutenant-Colonel Luther R. Stevens had the hot spot in the Moro country; he had a busy year in 1926. In May he was in the field in Lanao, in operations against the Moros at Tugaya. Six cottas were captured and seventy Moros were killed. The Constabulary lost six men killed and four officers and thirty-two men wounded.

In September, the patrols were on the island of Tawi-Tawi, in the tangled woods back of Bongao. A band of Moros was discovered in a sudden jungle that was swept with rain which made visibility uncertain. It was the old story of standing to the rush of wild krismen. The Constabulary held the field, to break even with the Moros. Eight Mohammedans died in that yelling frantic attack; three Constabulary soldiers died with them, and five others of the police were seriously wounded.

During that year, the force had sixteen encounters with outlaws. The records show the capture of twelve Moros, the wounding of ten and the killing of ninety-six. The ferocity of the resistance set up by the Mohammedans is shown by the casualty lists. In inflicting 109 casualties upon the Moros in sixteen engagements, the Constabulary suffered a loss, in killed and wounded, of 116 men and officers.

The Moros made it man for man. Here again it was demonstrated that the kris, at close quarters, has not been improved upon by the modern armaments of man.

The years rolled along and the battle mood persisted. There was no let-up from the constant Mindanao and Sulu patrol. Red-epauletted men still struggled for the peace of the Islands in a day that was only yesterday. In 1927, the grand old Chief, Rafael Crami, passed away. He was replaced by C. E. Nathorst, a doughty Norseman, who took up the command in a bad year of internal disorder. The middle islands came to life again, after a long period of peace.

The Emperor Flor Intrencherado, one Florencio Nativdad, caused a brief flurry of unrest in Negros. Intrencherado had been a valuable aide to Captain W. A. Smith of the Constabulary years before, in the pursuit of "Papa" Isio. Nothing was heard of the man for almost two decades until he suddenly came into prominence in Jaro by raising a red flag above his house, and beginning to preach of his supernatural powers.

A fortunate venture into the dried fish business in 1921 netted him the sum of 11,000 pesos, and with that he returned to Jaro to lay plans for an ambitious future. In 1925 he began a campaign for his "Imperial Government." At this time he announced his candidacy for the Governorship of Ilo-Ilo with a platform committed to the division of the island of Panay into several dukedoms with himself as "Emperor of the Archipelago."

He was taken in by the Constabulary on several occasions, serving short terms in jail, but we hear of him late in 1925 claiming to be in communication with a Spiritual Guide and threatening to bring down upon the people floods, pestilence, and famine if they refused to follow him.

He was declared insane, but natural catastrophies that followed increased his prestige fivefold. For one thing, Canloan volcano in Negros erupted; there was an earthquake in Japan, and a civil war in Mexico and China. The ignorant, remembering his prophecies, flocked to his standard. When they reached the total of more than 26,000, Intrencherado decided it was time to take over the government. Consolidating 300 of his men at Victorias Negros early on the morning of May 13, 1936, he instructed them to take over the town. Intrencherado was not there in person; he sent as his Lieutenant one Policarpo Montarde, who wrapped a white towel about his head and entered the Municipal building, stating he wished to read a "Law from Paris."

No officials being present, he attacked the police force, killing two patrolmen before a Constabulary detail under Lieutenants Ruffy and Cortes arrived and restored order.

Meanwhile, at Jaro, a squad of eight Constabulary with one officer was guarding the home of Intrencherado, prepared to forestall any further outbreaks. Four hundred men gathered to call the Emperor out to lead them but the Constabulary stood firm, and the "Emperor of the Archipelago," hopelessly insane, was removed to San Lazaro Hospital in Manila, where he remains today.

Then Nathorst turned back to the weary task of subduing the Moros. In January, the corps was in Sulu, before the cottas of Datu Tahil. Lantakas flared and men died before Tahil was captured and his hilltop fortress razed to the ground. The same month, the Alankats, ferocious mountain Manobos of Cotabato, flared in revolt under the leadership of Angkay and Maon. Colonel Stevens was in the field--this lanky, red-haired Mississippian, so thin that his associates would say to him as he left for patrol duty, "Turn sideways to them, Steve: no Moro could hit the edge of a knife blade."

Stevens knows Mindanao and Sulu as is the doubtful privilege of few white men. For a decade, he served as Chief of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu; he served the Insular government well. Today, he is among the last of the American old-timers and is in the service of the new Philippine army.

Certainly one of the most picturesque as well as the most dangerous figures in Moroland was Mampuroc, who had instigated the Alangkat movement among the Manobos in Mindanao. This was one of the most formidable native combinations of the later years, and its effects would have been far-reaching had not the Constabulary taken prompt and decisive action.

Mampuroc was probably the greatest Moro figure since Jikiri, and his short career of banditry had inspired legends and stories that were told about the Manobo fires in the mountains.

It was said that Mampuroc was immortal and beyond the reach of mortal punishment. He was, it was said, the reincarnation of Datu Alik, that famous Moro who had ruled Mindanao in an earlier day. Others of his tribesmen followers believed him to be the Spirit of Mohammed. And to the most rabid of his men he was "The God on Earth."

So great was the influence of this demi-god that the trails approaching his headquarters at Vintigan were blocked and choked with hordes of pilgrims bearing him gifts of coconut oil, red cloth, and edged weapons.

Along these twisting, winding trails the Constabulary patrols hastened, desperately seeking to cut off this menace before Mampuroc's followers had grown to the thousands in number.

Stevens made every effort to settle the affair without bloodshed, but Mampuroc was in no mood to treat with the government. He refused to meet the Colonel or the Governor of the province, and told his followers that Stevens and the Governor desired to become Alangkats.

Mampuroc was a man of great intelligence and great personal magnetism. He was able to convince his wild followers that he was indeed a god, and he began a systematic program of steeling them to face modern weapons of warfare. It was established as a fact in his camp that his magic wand (an umbrella stave mounted on an empty cartridge case), would make attacking soldiers blind; that a secondary black coral wand would turn bullets into rain; and that his wooden crocodiles would come to life and soar into the sky to combat enemy aircraft.

The followers of Mampuroc were among the most dangerous tribes of the Islands. The Manobos are stocky, sullen bowmen of Mindanao. They are equally facile with the kris and the barong. They wander a wild territory in Southern Mindanao; their fires high in the hills can be seen by the travelers who come down across Mindanao on the cogon-lined jungle trails. Technically they are not Moro, although many have adopted the religion of Islam.

With this raw, wild material at hand, Mampuroc began to develop an army. As the recruits flocked to his headquarters, he carefully disarmed them, rearming only a chosen few. After each new arrival had passed through a probationary period, he was armed in turn. The result of this stroke of genius was a frantic scramble for favor and a great disciplinary effect on the hillmen. The bearing of arms became a privilege that could come only after devotion to the god.

In many ways, Mampuroc was the most sincere leader the tribes of Mindanao were to produce. He taught his men to work; he forbade stealing; he frowned on marital intimacies between man and wife without the full desire of the woman. He was a strong leader, and he was rapidly welding a compact, loyal following when the Constabulary came. Regardless of Mampuroc's revolutionary tendencies, impartial history of the region will record him as a sincere leader. He disapproved of the payment of cedula tax, of sending children to the Christian schools, and of organized government in general.

In 1500, he would have been the ruler of ail the Philippines. In 1927, he was a government menace--and he was removed. A strong force of Constabulary invaded his territory, and on the morning of March 23, 1937, Mampuroc and thirty of his followers met their deaths. The Alangkat movement collapsed with the death of the Messiah, although patrols in the region were necessary for several weeks until the natives had lost their conviction that Mampuroc had escaped, or that he would return from the dead.

Actually, Mampuroc was found 200 meters from his house with five Springfield bullets in his chest, and he was buried in the jungle where he fell.

Combat against Moro cottas; pursuit of cattle thieves; the quelling of mutinies and public brawls--all were a part of the duties of the tropic police almost within the decade in which we live. In 1927, a Medal of Valor was won by a youngster en route to his first patrol.

It was on the steamship San Antonio near Oroquieta, Misamis, on January 30. Third Lieutenant Robert Young was a passenger on the ship; he was on his way to Dansalan, Lanao, to fight Moros. At eleven o'clock in the morning another passenger worked himself into that sudden murderous rage that is the habit of the Malay. The amuck seized a shotgun and fired at the Captain of the ship. As the Captain leaped to his cabin, the maniac killed the two helmsmen, and began to attack the passengers with a knife. Lieutenant Young was unarmed, but he was an officer of Constabulary. He hurried across the deck, ordering the crazed attacker to lay down his weapons. The shotgun spouted flame and Young was seriously wounded in the arms and legs. Young turned away and started below to his cabin to secure a revolver. In his absence the killer slew three of the passengers, and began to lower a boat to make his escape.

The Constabulary officer had no time to secure a weapon; he hurried back, unarmed, and grappled with the amuck native. He was stabbed to the heart and killed.

This young Lieutenant learned early the traditions of the men with red epaulets; he had been a Constabulary officer for 107 days, and was en route to his first assignment.

In 1928, Stimson, the aloof and courteous, was enjoying a brief tenure of office as Governor-General. Independence talk was in the air--but there were fifteen encounters with Moros in Sulu and Mindanao. Men were still dying for the peace. 1929 was quiet--but six Constabulary gave their lives in the nine encounters with Moro outlaws.

In 1930, a Moro Sultan, one Mamur, began to develop a following in the dread Lake Lanao country that may never be quieted without mass extermination of the Mohammedans. Mamur built cottas of heavy posts and hard packed earth, with bamboo thickets to protect the walls. By devious means, he acquired unlicensed firearms. He was ready for open rebellion.

Lieutenant Mayne took a detail into Lanao, with orders to bring in the unlicensed arms--or Sultan Mamur. He did neither; he died on the cotta walls in a magnificent, bloody assault that ranks with great fighting epics of the glamorous days of 1906. With Lieutenant Mayne that day, died four of his men; and six officers and thirteen privates of Constabulary were wounded in that capture of a Moro cotta and the killing of nine of its defenders.

The encounter was a desperate charge across open country to the walls of the flaming cotta, which was defended by brass lantakas and a swarm of krismen.

Twenty days later, on May 28, Captain James R. Grimstead led a Constabulary force against the cotta of Datu Gnassi at Tugao, Lanao. The fighting was a horrible hand-to-hand combat on the walls.

As one reads of these encounters, and visualizes that terrific resistance of the Moros and their quite evident ability to inflict casualty for casualty, there comes to mind again that often discussed question of the relative merits of pulajan and Moro as a fighting man.

All of the Malays are valiant; there can be no doubt of that; but of the two, in the opinion of the writer, the palm for fighting genius must be awarded to the Mohammedan of the south. They have had more practice, for one thing. The pulajan resistance lasted for a short decade; the Moros have raised a kris against every nation in the world, almost, in that magnificent defense of their island empire. Their battles are measured by centuries of time.

Even in the face of such able summaries of pulajan and Moro as have been made by Captains Preuss and Holmes, this statement of Moro superiority must stand. Preuss and Holmes fought both pulajan and Moro, in the days when they had to send two men with the cook as he went to dig camote roots at the edge of the stockade walls. The two Captains stated that the hill Filipinos (pulajans) fought equally as well as the Moros--if and when they had as good anting-antings.

In that qualifying clause rests the superiority of the Moro. No anting-anting of holy oil or scrap of paper scrawled with the name of a "Pope" could equal the religious anting-anting--the Koran of Mohammed-- which guaranteed repose with the virgins in scented gardens to the men who died in battle.

In the Mohammedan country, the Constabulary faced an antagonist who fought under wily jungle rules of his own making. Here were no pulajans, rushing in massed formation to death; here was a calculating Moro, who used every spear of grass for concealment and who had developed homicide into a science. The Moro was as willing to die as the pulajan; he proved that on many occasions. But in that pleasant transition to Paradise, the Mohammedan expected to carry with him certain Christians who were in his last line of attack on earth. Almost alwavs, the Moro rode to Allah on his white horse, with the shades of two or three Christians at his saddlebow.

The Moro is harder to stop than the pulajan. The pulajan can be killed. The Moro can be killed too, but the process is infinitely longer and more complicated. Furthermore, the Moro requires an unbelievable amount of lead to accomplish that desirable result. He absorbs bullets without seeming effect. He carries fanaticism to a depth unplumbed by the pulajan; almost, the Moro carries his fanaticism to the point where it defies death itself.

The last decade rolled along; 1930 ended and the time came for a summation of the activity of a year. Again the Moros had been consistent in that matter of inflicting casualties. Fifteen Moros had died at the hands of the patrols in seven encounters. One officer and four privates of Constabulary had died with them, and six officers and fifteen men had been wounded.

1931 ... two officers and three men died during an assault of the Constabulary barracks at Tayig. Captain Leon Angeles met his death in Jolo; jungle clearings still ran red with the blood of men.

As early as 1925 there had been indications that peace conditions in Pangasinan and Nueva Ecija were threatened by another powerful fanatical coalition. An organization known as "Kapisanan-Kabola-Kasinag," numbering some hundred members, had appeared in these provinces. Among the most active leaders was one Juan Lago, who set himself up as St. John the Baptist, second in command to General Cabula.

This Cabula, the organizer, was well known to the forces of law and order. In Pangasinan he had been accused of swindling and sedition, and in Nueva Ecija of sedition and rape. The organization he built was military in character, the members having commissioned and noncommissioned ranks, and wearing a prescribed uniform of red blouse, blue trousers, and red hat. The aim of the society was the so-called betterment of the society members by a division of the land and of personal property among the poor.

Revolution was to obtain this desired result, and the plans called for an attack on San Jose on Friday, March 13, 1925, after which a new government would be set up under General Cabula.

As a means of identifying members of the "K-K-K," injections of a mercury solution were made in both arms and in the thighs, under the belief that such injection gave great physical strength and an immunity from bullets and the bite of poisonous reptiles. Each member paid a three peso initiation fee, and a total of eighty centavos for the injections. As a result of the injection of the mercury compound, a knot rose on the skin that remained with the members until death.

When the membership of the organization had reached a total of 2,000, Cabula ordered an attack on the Constabulary. On March 3, 1925, the misguided fanatics moved against the Constabulary station, and in the battle that followed, General Cabula and five of his men were killed. The Constabulary had one private wounded by a spear thrust.

The society was six years in recovering from the loss of their leader, but in the early morning of January 11, 1931, a band of sixty K-K-K members made an attack on the Constabulary station at Tayug in Pangasinan. Moving stealthily, at two o'clock in the morning they completely surprised the Constabulary station, silencing the sentry with bolos before he could give the alarm. The barracks were burned and all the arms of the detachment carried away. With the town defenseless, the fanatics then burned the Municipal Building and the Post Office, and sacked the town of Tayug. One building they spared -- the Catholic convent. Inside its thick walls they took refuge and made provision for a stand. Reinforcements of Constabulary came immediately to the scene, and after a fierce two-hour battle the convent was captured by the Insular Police.

With that defeat, this flaring of the Colorum movement in the north died away, leaving the Constabulary free to turn their entire attention to the Moros.

On October 9, 1932, near Camp Seit, in Jolo, a Constabulary patrol under Lieutenant Vicente Alagar was rushed by hostiles. Alagar and thirteen of his men were killed; the nine survivors extricated themselves from the scene with difficulty. Imam Ibra exhorted his followers to great heights of fanaticism that day--the kris blades bit deeply during that close range ambush.

Then on September 6, 1933, Lieutenant Julio F. Barbajera was leading a patrol on Jolo Island. The whistle of a spear was the first warning of attack, and Barbajera went down, his detail rushed by a few Moros. The Mohammedans, under Mahamud, had a field day from ambush at the expense of the Constabulary patrol. With Barbajera, the Police left six privates dead on the field.

On February 9, 1934, Lieutenant Barbajera received a posthumous award of the Medal of Valor.

Sixty days later, on November 20, Lieutenant Manano G. Esculto, recently appointed commander of Camp Andres in Sulu, took six men to investigate a murder near the Constabulary station. He was striding through a clearing at the head of his soldiers, when the party walked into ambush. Esculto fell at the first shot from the bush, and his six men were able to drop the three Moros who launched an attack with kris and campilane blades.

Ambush, with men skewered on spears---this in 1934!

On November 14, 1935, the last Medal of Valor was awarded to a Constabulary soldier. Seventeen years after he had led a detachment across a swaying ladder at Bayang cotta in 1917, Paulmo Santos was decorated with the highest award of the corps.

That day in 1917, a high cotta wall had required the placement of scaling ladders before the assault could be made. The American officer commanding the detachment called for volunteers. All four of the American junior officers stepped forward as one man, but before a decision could be made a tall young Filipino spoke, "Sir, I should be allowed to lead this assault. They say Filipinos cannot fight Moros. Here is the opportunity for a Filipino to lead Filipinos in the assault of a Moro cotta. I should be allowed the command of the assault party.

And so he was awarded leadership of that desperate party. He placed the ladders and led the way to the crest of the walls. Every Constabulary soldier in the attack was wounded and the cotta fell.

Today, Santos is Major General and Chief of Staff of the new Philippine Army.

One of the last operations of the Philippine Constabulary as a unit of fighting men--this one, a brief and bloody encounter in the new Province of Bukidnon--in Mindanao. It is narrated in a clipping from the New York Times, a brief news report, with no hint of drama. The editor was unaware of the fact that he was practically writing the epilogue to a grand career of jungle service. This is combat in 1936:

"One Constabulary man and four bandits were killed today in a clash in Bukidnon Province, Constabulary headquarters was advised today. The fighting started when the soldiers called to the bandits to surrender and were answered with a volley of shots. Fabello, the gang leader, was killed, with three of his followers. The rest surrendered."

In that account is one significant phrase: "The soldiers called upon the bandits to surrender." Always, the antagonist had the right of the first shot. The Constabulary was the agent of law and order; they killed to preserve the peace.

On January 14, 1936, President Manuel Quezon, of the new Philippine Commonwealth, sounded the end of one of the most storied bodies of fighting men in the history of conquest and war. His pen signed an order transferring the Philippine Constabulary to the new National Army of the Philippines. The collar insignia, "P. C.," gave way, after thirty-six years of jungle service, to a regular military establishment of regiments and brigades.

In summing up the campaigns of the Philippine Constabulary, a discussion of the weapons at hand or the marksmanship of the men is not sufficient to explain the greatness of these jungle campaigners. The point involved is their terrain of battle.

The rifle and the revolver and even the machine gun lose much of their authority in dense jungle. The visibility is poor and the firing range exceedingly short. The number of rounds a man can fire is limited; too quickly, the combat reaches close quarters. With a Krag rifle and a .45 Colt revolver, every Constabulary soldier of the later days had a potential firing possibility of eleven shots without reloading. He was often outnumbered twenty to one, or more than twenty to one. The principle of the campaigns involved, not the destructive possibilities of the eleven shots at his command; to be considered most was that grim element of time. In the face of a sudden bolo rush, the police often had time, for but two or three shots before the action was man to man. And against impossible odds.

For bruising shoulder-to-shoulder work, the native weapons remain the best in that jungle scene that developed them. At close quarters, the Moro kris or the pulajan talibong have destructive qualities not surpassed by the modern automatic pistol or the sub-machine gun.

The passage of a high-velocity bullet through the body is killing but not immediately fatal; sometimes, in the heat of battle, men can remain on their feet, desperately wounded, for a lengthy period of time. But the last despairing swing of a bolo blade, in the hands of a dead man riddled with bullets, could be deadly. And the blow of an edged weapon has a finality about it; it knocks a man out of action quickly. Too, there is a mental menace in the facing of bright razor-edged steel.

Upon these facts of the nature of the native resistence, the men of the Constabulary may rest their greatness as fighting men. Against the pulajans and Moros of 1904 and 1905 and 1906, a company of machine gunners would have had horrible moments of fear and doubt as they were rushed by a thousand fanatics in close and crowded quarters.

The work of the Constabulary, in facing that jungle horde with single-shot weapons, is little short of miraculous. Battle in those days required a fiber that is not necessary in these days of casual long-range work with the enemy not often in sight. In that Philippine jungle the Constabulary developed a degree of bush knowledge, superb judgment, and fighting genius that stamps them as among the greatest individual fighters of history.

They rest on their unvarnished combat reports.

The officers of the Philippine Constabulary were consistent men of battle. To many of them, the conquest of the Philippines was but a facet of a lifetime profession at arms. Crockett, Rivers, Harbord, White, the two Griffiths, Preuss, Allen, Bandholtz, and many others saw service in France.

The rapid fighting pace of the Constabulary had eminently fitted them for future responsibilities. Nor did that responsibility weigh with undue heaviness upon their shoulders; they had taken great responsibility, twenty years earlier, while youngsters in the Philippine Constabulary.

Some of the later services of these officers were gilded with an aura of great romance. They scurried away to settle boundary disputes and to serve as military attaches in distant ports half a world away. They were living characters from adventure books. There was never doubt or indecision where they were; they would have been the first to scoff at the suggestion that they were figures of romance. E. R. Griffiths was one of them the first American officer to fall in France. We can imagine him there, hurrying with that restless Constabulary pace to the front line to die. Across a political boundary line, in Flanders, his fellow Constabulary veteran, R. H. Griffiths, met the last great adventure during that miserable retreat of the British army from Mons to Ypres. Two valiants walking hand in hand out of life, in battle, as became ex-Constabulary men.

We have an intimate picture of Bandholtz, suffering great disappointment in the World War. For a while, he had been at the front, proud to command his brigade in action.

Then General Pershing sent for him. Bandholtz himself told of that interview that turned an old war-horse away from the bloody fields of France.

"Now, Bandholtz," Pershing said, "you are going to hate me for this. But the Provost Department is in a disgraceful condition. I want you to take hold of it and put it in shape. When you can come to me and say that the provost guard is working to your satisfaction, you can go back to your command at the front."

So Bandholtz took over the 22,000 officers and men serving on provost duty in all of the allied countries, including military police jails. It was a tremendous and a dirty job. The war ended with Bandholtz Provost Marshall.

And then, long after the war, a statue was erected, in Budapest, Hungary, to an American general. A mob had been bent on wrecking the government building, which was without police protection. It had seemed that the mob would have its way, when an American army officer stepped out, armed with a riding whip and a determined manner, and stopped them in their tracks and sent them away.

So there in Budapest today is a statue of General Bandholtz with his riding crop, flinging a gesture to the past. To a past that is tied up, more closely than anyone could possibly know, with the capture of a wrinkled little brown bandit named Simeon Ola, in the jungles of the Philippines.

It was the old Constabulary gesture of men against odds. And so Bandholtz came to the end of a life that had been magnificently full. He had returned to his home at Constantine, Michigan. His wife came home one afternoon to find Bandholtz peacefully dead, sitting in his garden.

With Garwood the glamorous, we bring this account to a close. His stride through life was a romantic gesture. Garwood, the great ladies man--"How, Madame, can a beautiful and charming lady like yourself, throw herself away on a shriveled-up little cuss like your husband?" Gesturing beneath General Allen's nose with his long cigar; swaggering across the Philippine Archipelago with his hundred pairs of shoes and his two pistols that he could use so well; riding into ambush and mountain conference and steaming swamp--and loving it all.

Gunfire and glamour and fair ladies and Garwood. He had a facility for finding trouble. His Constabulary days finished, he joined the famed Pennsylvania State Police as one of the original members.

"No," they told him once, "you can't arrest that man. He's in a saloon, surrounded by his armed mob."

"Can't I?" said Garwood. "A policeman can arrest anybody--anytime. If he can't do that, he isn't a policeman."

And then, as a Lieutenant of Pennsylvania State Police, he resigned to wander away again, with those bright eyes fixed on new and fascinating horizons. He escaped the bandit bullets as he had made light of the pulajan blades in the Philippines. It was not written that this man of action should die in battle.

New experiences; new scenes; new friends. Garwood could never grow lonely, nor old, nor sated with life---he could draw at will from his store of magnificent memories. He died peacefully, as so many grand fighting men do; in a hospital bed at Omaha, he jested with the surgeons as his life ebbed away.

He was never completely serious; he was always restless; and never, in the slightest degree, did he understand the meaning of that grim emotion that is fear.

It was Jesse S. Garwood most of all, possibly, who best typified the spirit of those dauntless, dreadful days when men of the Philippine Constabulary were engaged in the conquest of jungle.

The jungles of Samar and Mindanao still remain--to be pointed out as the symbol of an island empire that has felt too lightly the impress of civilization. America is laying aside "the white man's burden" that was the motive force of the Constabulary gallants of three decades in the past.

The Philippines are in process of abandonment. Today, on the edges of that mighty jungle, the curious may possibly find in Samar a rounded hill that was once a pulajan fortress--or in Mindanao, a crumbling ruin that once flamed with lantakas as a cotta of the Moros. As the curious one gazes at these evidences of a stern day, there may come a brief awareness of the romantic martial history that broods over the solemn bush.

The tourist may look about him and see here, a place which once sounded with the dreadful patter of bare feet that signaled the rush of the bolomen; or there, a place where a lone Constabularyman won a Medal of Valor in 1906, But only the most imaginative will be able to reconstruct those jungle battles that are thirty years in the past.

The men who haunted that bush--and made it forever their own by right of conflict--are forgotten by a nation that forgets too easily in the press of other, greater wars.

Only the jungle remains--waiting to be forced again by some lesser breed of men.

The End

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Original publication © 1938 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

Filipiniana Reprint Series © 1985 Cacho Hermanos, Inc.

This publication (HTML format & original artwork) © 2001 Bakbakan International.

Transcription courtesy of Ashley Bass.